Thursday, 23 September 2010

Another nail in the SL Education Coffin

I'm not sure who the Seriuos Games Learning Group are, but really I'm still shocked by the number of people still promoting Second Life as an Education Platform.

I had a client on the phone today (in fact had 2 for 2 different reasons).

He was being sold Second Life for their Academy, I had met him a few months back but we were too expensive (this was before our wonderful discounted TCG for Schools). He was being told that Second Life was the best place for kids to learn and travel around. There was no mention of the Teen Grid closing, no mention of "funny name" brigade. All he was being told was Second Life is BACK and its better than ever!

Then the next call was from Corporate IT for a local autority, who has been asked by a school to allow them access to Second Life. They also have TCG and was asking for that access too. So this IT bloke was going on about openning 20000+ ports so people could use Second Life and Second Places.

I had to correct him that to use the TCG its 1 static IP address and open 10 ports, all of which can be configured to open on after an internal request to a Cisco router. Within 5 minutes this nice IT person had opened the ports to TCG and tested, all connecting instantly.

He started asking me questions about Second Life and I just stopped him. We are Second Places, we don't do much in Second Life and we would never encourage a corporation or education establishment to use Second Life any more. I explained that this conversation was one we had many many times with corporate IT and one we gave up arguing against over 3 years ago.

As Second Places moves forward with Unity 3D as well as OpenSim for Education. We want everyone to be successful, but please.. Stop promoting Second Life as a platform for business/education. Linden have made it clear in the past couple of months, Second Life is a SOCIAL NETWORK site. That is why I started in Second Life over 6 years ago. I even still have my beta first land on the mainland grid. I still like to hang out with old friends there. But its not for business!